Epiblog for the Feast of SS Peter and Paul

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. I’d like to say that preparations for our “Grand Depart” for the Isle of Arran are progressing apace, but in truth I, personally, have done sod all towards it, and Deb, too, has been busy elsewhere. So we really must get our act in gear next week. It’s remained stubbornly hot and dull, with occasional showers. When it showers, it really showers, as well.

When it stops raining, the birds come out and patter about on the decking and on the roof of the conservatory. Matilda finally noticed one doing precisely this one morning during the week, and mirrored its movements exactly, stalking it from below. It went over to one corner of the roof, she went over to the corresponding corner of the conservatory floor. Eventually, though, the bird got fed up and flew off, leaving Matilda looking rather disconsolate.

Muttkins has had a succession of long or short walks, depending on the weather, sometimes in Zak’s company, sometimes not. It seems unbelievable, but it will be a year on July 3^rd since we went up to Baildon Moor and picked her up from the farm and brought her back here. July 3^rd is also the fifth birthday of my little niece Holly, so we’ve got a double cause for celebration.

Another cause for celebration is, of course, the end of term. In one sense, it ought to be a cause for concern, as well, since it marks the start of the lean months when Debbie will not be earning any money until at least September. Plus I still have to lever the remaining arrears out of Kirklees College with a crowbar just to bring us up to date [which is also exactly the sort of tedious admin that has stopped me this week from getting on with preparing to go to Arran].  Set against this, though, at least Debbie can shrug off the stress and hassle of another academic year, and relax for a while. I think it’s starting to get to her: she came back from college one day last week, the TV was on, softly, in the background, with a wide shot of Copacabana Beach and Adrian Chiles wittering on aimlessly about Suarez snacking on Chelleni, with some fava beans and a good chianti, and said:

Oh, are you watching the cricket?

Yes, says I, it's the first test between Argentina and Nigeria, the wicket looks as if it might take spin on the final day, but I'm just waiting while they send Geoffrey Boycott down there to stick his car key in the surface, once the beach volleyball's finished. Sometimes, it’s not the size of the disk, it's the speed of the processor that's the problem.

She’s also taken up cooking, insofar as pouring boiling water over couscous can be defined as cooking. This has been necessitated by the occurrence this week of several final classes marked with “bring and share” food and drink sessions at the end.  I’m not sure what her colleagues think of couscous, but she managed to make the kitchen table look like an explosion in a couscous factory.  She has returned from these events laden with carrier bags of cupcakes, crisps and chocolate biscuits, plus at least one bunch of flowers and two or three thank you cards signed by her entire classes, so she must have been doing something right.

For my own part, the week progressed better than I had hoped, in health terms at least. The foul bugs that had infested me last week fled, their departure hastened, no doubt, by the onset of the vitamin regime which commenced at the behest of the Consultant at the last hospital visit, including Ferrous Fumarate and Vitamin B12. Mind you, this could be just coincidence, but either way, I was pleased to be feeling more like myself. I can admit now that I was worried in case it was more than just a bug, but this time around, at least, I seemed to have dodged a bullet.

The outside world, beyond the confines of our little enclave, is full of bullets to dodge, of course. Literal and metaphorical. Mostly in Syria and Iraq at the moment, but watch this space, in a week where President Obama committed armed drones to the theatre of war: the Pentagon said some of the drones and manned aircraft it was flying over Iraq were armed, but that they would be used to gather intelligence and ensure the safety of US personnel on the ground, rather than carrying out air strikes. And if you believe that, dear reader, how do you feel about the tooth fairy? 

Here at home, the BBC has continued to ignore the voice of legitimate protest against “austerity” and the cuts. As I sit here typing this, they have already had 6000 complaints about the lack of coverage of last Saturday’s central London demonstration, and they compounded this yesterday by ignoring the protest in Westminster by members of Dpac, a group set up specifically to oppose the effects of the cuts on disabled people. 

Since we can’t rely on the BBC to report things truthfully and accurately any more, we have to piece together the story from a number of other sources. Demonstrators set up a camp in the grounds of Westminster Abbey to protest against cuts to financial support for disabled people.

Members of disabled people against the cuts (Dpac) pitched tents and said they intended to occupy the green outside the doors of the Abbey until 22 July.  The Dean of Westminster was asked to negotiate with the protesters on Saturday evening, after they claimed he initially refused their request for permission to stay.  The group also sent a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, urging the church not to forcibly remove them from its grounds. Around 100 protesters began the demonstration, but a heavy police presence meant their number dwindled to around 50. There were scuffles and confrontations and apparently several onlookers and tourists were surprised by the amount of overkill the police were using compared to the actual threat, of two or three dozen disabled people locking themselves to the railings in Parliament Square. 

The Metropolitan police said that one person was arrested on suspicion of assaulting a police officer as protesters sought to establish a camp and officers resolved to stop them. Police stood on top of tents in a bid to prevent the demonstrators from pitching them. It’s amazing how they can always find extra police when a Chinese despot wants to run the Olympic Torch through the streets of London, or there's a miners' strike to break, or there's a demo to kettle, or they panic because some people in wheelchairs might chain themselves to the railings. Where were this lot when the foxes were being torn to pieces in defiance of the hunting ban? Or come to that, where were they when my car radio was being nicked?

I’ll be interested to see how this one turns out, but I am not holding my breath that the Church of England will do the right thing.  Yes, Westminster Abbey is a national treasure and yes, there has to be some sort of right to private property and access, but there is also a right to legitimate peaceful protest, or there damn well should be. The policing seems as deliberately designed to sweep disabled people into the background as the policy which Dpac was protesting against: the loss of the Independent Living Payment, which will mean more disabled people being prevented from leading relatively independent lives, and consigned to care homes and the like, instead, because it’s cheaper. 

In olden times, one could have relied upon several dozen Labour MPs to show their solidarity with such a protest, but these days, it is Labour policy on benefits to be more Tory than the Tories, for fear of upsetting Daily Mail and Sun readers, and only John McDonnell MP had the courage to turn out and support the protesters. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader at the moment, was busy writing one of a series of what are beginning to look like increasingly desperate pleas to get me to donate £3.00 to the Labour Party for the chance to meet him in person at Doreen Lawrence’s gala bloody dinner at the House of Lords on July 9^th.   

Readers of previous blogs will recall that somehow I have managed to get myself on the email list of “One Nation Labour” and as a result I receive regular updates from the Labour Party, jollying me along and urging me to donate to the cause. I always reply to these emails, and my replies are either wearily instructive, angry, or abusive, and occasionally all three. Clearly no-one ever reads these replies, or I would have been crossed off the list long ago. It just goes to show that at the heart of the current Labour Party there is a self-selecting, self-serving clique around Ed Miliband, and they are all sharing the delusion that if they put their hands over their ears and say “la la la la I can’t hear you”, this will be enough to win the next election. It won’t, and we will all suffer another five years of The Blight Brigade’s nuclear winter as a result. Which will be a tragedy. Meanwhile, I am going to reply to this email by asking Ed Miliband how much I would have to donate to guarantee that I would have no chance of my ever meeting either him, or Doreen Lawrence. 

And so we came to Sunday, and the feast of Saints Peter and Paul. This rather “engineered” joint celebration is regarded by the Catholic church as a “solemnity”, having been previously designated as a Double, a Greater Double, or a First-Class Feast. It is also a Holy day of Obligation. I suppose we should expect no less of the two people who, between them, did so much to take the simple message of Jesus, codify it, complicate it, graft on some sort of compulsory morality, and turn it into a worldwide movement with power, splendour, wealth and influence. Thence comes orthodox doctrine and, inevitably, heresy. All of which sounds like I am disapproving of the process.  Which I am, sort, of. The story of St Peter and St Paul is so well known that I won’t even begin to insult your intelligence by summarising them. 

Without them, of course, Jesus would have gone down in history as just another Essene, a Gnostic raving in the wilderness. By the way, when I say I am ambivalent about the way in which Paul and Peter shaped the church, it is in no way intended to be a specific comment or attack on the Catholic church: the process can be seen over and over again, and not only in churches. You take a zealous, young, idealistic group of people, the Oxford Famine Committee, and you end up with Oxfam, a charity operating all over the world with a global HQ in Oxford with an atrium and clocks showing the time in every time-zone on Earth. 

The argument is often advanced in favour of large-scale organisation, be it of churches or charities, that they can achieve so much more by scaling up, by acting like a business, than if they remained a ramshackle ad hoc committee with trestle tables and a collecting tin. The danger is of course, that they (the church, or the charity) become too concerned with self-perpetuation and forget what they were trying to achieve. One wonders how many people would continue to donate to Oxfam if they read Paul Theroux’s coruscating comments about aid workers and their negative effect on Africa, in Dark Star Safari.
 

Personally, I try and concentrate my charitable efforts, such as they are these days, into smaller charities where I know that my weedy widow’s mite will not be swallowed up in paying someone to polish the clocks in the atrium, but has at least a fighting chance of getting to the people or causes that the charity is trying to help or achieve. In the same way as these days my church is not some lavish baroque cathedral with censers swinging and monks chanting plainsong, attractive though those can be in certain circumstances, but often a clump of trees, the front seat of the camper van, or the windswept wilds of Walney, with the plainsong provided by a passing seagull:

When one’s friends hate each other

how can there be peace in the world?

Their asperities diverted me in my green time.

A blown husk that is finished

but the light sings eternal

a pale flare over marshes

where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change

As Ezra Pound put it, much better than I can.  I’m not saying all charities are like this, or all churches, and I’m not saying that those which are the most self-perpetuating, are like that all the time. It does sometimes feel though, that Oxfam doesn’t actually want to abolish hunger and world poverty, because what would they do then? Apart from sign on. Likewise, the church occasionally seems so preoccupied with its own worldly wealth, pomp and power, that they have forgotten that Jesus, if he was around today, would be with the people dossing down under the railway arches, or rifling through skips: outside, with the protestors in the tents. 

True, Oxfam and their ilk have done good works. Criticising the Junta for causing poverty in the UK and getting under their skin, for one thing. And the churches have done immense good in spreading healthcare and education in the developing world. So it’s not all bad. I guess what I am saying, what I am arguing for, is a re-balancing, a re-assessment on behalf of organised religion, concentrating on the core message, and following that to its logical conclusion, however painful the conclusion you come to. 

Why is this important? Because now, the church of England has to respond to the challenge laid down by the Dpac protestors, and either stand with them, or stand by and let them be removed by the police. Given the outcome of the previous “Occupy” protest at St Pauls, I am not hopeful, though I would be glad to be pleasantly surprised. 

I’ve often said, to an audience of minus one, unless you count the cat or the dog, that what the country needs is a massive spiritual awakening, something to shake the foundations of the banks and the city, to re-focus people on things that really matter. Maybe that process has to start with the church, or churches gong through that process. Not gay marriage, not women bishops, not coffee mornings or flower rotas, not genteel collections of raffia items for recycling for Africa. 

What we need is some sort of temporary rapture. Stop in mid-sermon, walk away from your plough in mid-furrow, get up from your desk, and if you can physically make it, go to Westminster and occupy the Abbey. And stay there until this cruel law is reversed, and all the other cruel and unchristian laws enacted since 2010. And stay there until there is an end to homelessness and a commitment to build new homes for all that need them. 

I’ve been taken to task before for being self-referential and quoting from my own stuff, but I wrote this ten years ago in Here Endeth The Epilogue and it’s still true today: 

Just for a fleeting moment I had a vision of a new church. A new church for a new era, where all the leaves recognised they were leaves like all the other leaves, and that they had all sprung from the same root. Imagine a church with the intellectual rigour and the anthems and the cathedrals of Anglicanism, the pomp and majesty and symbolism of the Catholics, the contemplative and peaceful life of the Quakers, the reforming zeal of the Methodists, assembling hand-loom weavers on the windy moorlands of Northern England to sing ragged hymns and tell them there can be a better world in this life AND the next; the innovation of the people who are willing to believe in things like spiritual healing - and who is to say they are wrong, it could just be science that we don’t understand yet. Imagine if we all rose up together one day and went to one place and let out a resounding shout that war shall cease and poverty shall cease and everybody shall have enough food and water.

Well, as Father Ted would doubtless say if he were here right now, that would be an ecumenical matter. It’s good to dream though, once in a while. If you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true? You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams. I'll let you be in my dreams, if I can be in yours.

Meanwhile, back here in the wide-awake world, or what passes for it these days, I’m going to earth up some spuds, I think, provided it doesn’t rain, and then see if I can knock some tasks off tomorrow’s list, today. But before any of that, I’m going to put the kettle on, because dreaming is thirsty work. 

Epiblog for the Feast of St Alban

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and rather a sad one in some ways, as we have now passed Midsummer, and can only expect things to get colder and darker from now on. As someone who lives from summer to summer, and sees winter as purgatory to be endured, there’s always a sad sense of time passing on the summer solstice, well, for me at any rate.

All seasons are alike to Matilda, of course, since her life consists of sleeping punctuated by meal breaks, though she has spent quite a lot of time outdoors this week, as we’ve tended to have hot, sultry, dull days, where she finds a shady spot outside and snoozes there all day, instead of on her Maisie-blanket on the chair. Now that term itself is winding down, and the GCSE classes have come to an end, Deb has more time to take Misty out for longer rambles, as opposed to a quick spin round the park, up into the woods, or down the cricket field, so they’ve been doing 11-mile route marches once more, much to Muttkins’s delight. In fact, she gets so fussy when she thinks she’s going walkies, by the time they actually set off she’s probably already done at least a quarter of a mile, just in running back and forth to the door.

Debbie is, of course, demob-happy, and deservedly so. This has been a gruelling enough academic year without the additional issue of her pay arrears and all the attendant unpleasantness, and now of course she is already starting to worry that this furore over not being paid will adversely affect her chances of being offered any hours next term. I have told her not to worry, because I am pretty sure the College makes a habit of not paying any of its part time hourly-paid tutors until they threaten to come down in person and beat the door in, so my mildly sarcastic dunning letters and “final demands” will have seemed tame by comparison.

Other than that, Debbie’s main preoccupation over the last few days has been getting to grips with her new phone.  Given that it took us two and a half hours just to get the back off the bloody thing so we could put the battery in, I could see that was going to be a bad omen, and so it has proved. It was not helped by Sony’s lack of a printed manual, the stingy bastards, though you can download one from the internet and print it out at your own expense, but the phone still does random things and surprises her, and occasionally me, into the bargain. Last night I had gone to bed and was asleep when at 12.30AM my mobile started ringing.  Given that a mobile phone call at that time of night usually means bad news, I groped my way to consciousness and answered it, only to find it was Deb from the other side of the connecting wall, having mistakenly pressed a button on the touch-screen to call back a missed call from me, earlier in the day. She apologised, and I went back to sleep.  The one good thing she has discovered about it is that she can get the internet on it, specifically Ebay, so she can now sit and surf for shiny things wherever she is, 24/7

As well as being sad at the passing of summer this week, I’m afraid to say I have also not been very well. My latest lot of blood tests from the hospital appear to be reasonably normal, but apparently I am deficient in Iron, and Vitamin B12, and this will have to be rectified, first by means of injections and then tablets.  None of which stopped some foul bug invading my system on Thursday and laying me low. Only metaphorically – I did actually get out of bed and made it as far as the wheelchair, but all I did all day was snooze and sneeze and doze and ache, and I was about as much use as a fart in a colander. Friday was just as bad, and it was only yesterday that I started to feel a bit more like myself again. I could have done without it, to be honest. I hate the inconvenience of being ill, and of course it played havoc with my “to do” list.

So I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to the outside world, to be honest. Tens of thousands of people – some say up to fifty thousand – marched through London yesterday to protest against “austerity”, an event which went totally unreported by the BBC, to its lasting shame.  Of course, if Black Bloc had smashed a few bus shelters, it would have been top of the bulletin. For all the wrong reasons.

Meanwhile, Nick Clegg has vowed to re-create a truly independent Liberal Party once again. Ha. Good luck with that. And the DWP have been caught out yet again fiddling the figures, cherry-picking and publishing selective statistics. So, no change there, then.  Perhaps the most significant story of the week was that some wag or humorist managed to hack the official “Twitter” feed of the Labour Party and posted a “tweet” promising a new Labour policy of a free owl for everybody. Not only was this amusing in itself, but several hundred people apparently said that if this was ever to become official Labour policy, they would definitely consider voting Labour.  Which really ought to give Ed Miliband food for thought, on a number of levels.

Iraq continues to descend into a shambolic mess. Obama has sent several hundred “special advisors” to “guard the US Embassy”, which translates as “Navy Seals” to harass ISIS’s supply lines and carry out decapitation missions.  Cameron has been too busy mugging up on Magna Carta to join in. He seems to think that the values of Magna Carta should now be the ones that underpin the teaching of “British values” in schools, which is quite ironic, given the Junta’s consistent attempts to undermine it and dismantle its hard-won privileges for the common man.

And of course, England crashed out of the world cup. Personally, I had very low expectations of the England team in this contest. If they were going to win, they would have had to beat some, or all of the following: Germany, Holland, Italy, Argentina, Brazil. Not going to happen.  We can’t defend, we’re turgid and boring in midfield, and we have nobody who can score goals. On the plus side, though, Joe Hart knows all of the words to God Save The Queen.

Notwithstanding England’s hasty and ignominious exit, we shall, nevertheless, continue to have the World Cup served up for breakfast lunch and tea. The slots are already booked, sadly. In any case I am not sure I am comfortable with an international sporting event which has been built on misery and evictions, but I suppose I should have managed my expectations. It’s not the first time. The Greeks, God strafe them, shot all the feral cats in Athens in the run-up to the Athens Olympics, and the 2012 Olympics in London saw the Junta deporting Polish rough sleepers to tidy up the East End, using a loophole in EU law that enables people to be sent back to “comparable conditions” – not that anybody really bothered to check.

And so we came to today, the feast of St Alban. St Albans these days always carries faintly ridiculous overtones. I don’t know why, and I do apologise in advance to anyone who lives there. It’s one of those places, for me, like Biggleswade, where you imagine 1930s bungalows, spinsters cycling to matins, and old colonels in blazers and Oxford Bags taking a Pekingese for a walk at Sunday teatime. If E F Benson hadn’t appropriated Rye as the model for his fictional town of Tilling in the Lucia books, St Albans would have been a good alternative, apart from its lack of seaside.

Of course, I am doing St Albans a massive disservice here, for in reality it has a long and noble history stretching back to the Roman foundation of Verulamium. Legends assert that St Alban was a Roman soldier at Verulamium, and he may even have been a Romano-Briton. Mind you, legends assert lots of things, Legends asserted that England could win the World Cup. Some scholars assert that Verulamium was actually part of an enclave which resisted Roman rule, but that doesn’t really stack up with Alban being part of a garrison there.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Alban, a pagan, is said to have sheltered a priest who was fleeing persecution. Alban took the priest's cloak and allowed him to escape. Roman soldiers arrested Alban, who was later beheaded. Bede, writing in his Ecclesiastical History, dates the martyrdom to the reign of the Emperor Diocletian, around 305AD, but modern scholars favour around 209AD, in the reign of Septimus Severus.  A cult developed around St Alban, and the fifth-century St Germanus of Auxerre mentions that he visited a shrine dedicated to Alban during his crusade through Britain preaching against the Pelagian heresy. I used to know what the Pelagian heresy was, but I am ashamed to say I have forgotten. It has joined that huge amount of stuff that has been driven out of my head by new stuff that has made its way in. This is but one of the many ways in which I resemble Homer Simpson.

Bede had previously mentioned a church dedicated to St Alban, and the supposed site of Alban’s martyrdom, Holmhurst Hill, became the site of an Abbey, founded by King Offa (he of the Dyke, no sniggering at the back) in the 8^th Century AD. After that, the fate of St Alban’s relics becomes more problematic. During one of the many Danish incursions, they were said to have been transported to the Isle of Ely for safe keeping. St Canute’s church in Odense claims to have relics of St Alban, stolen during Canute’s raid on York in 1075.  However, there is also the tradition that St Germanus of Auxerre was rewarded for his visit by being given some of the relics of St Alban.

And there is might have ended, because most of St Alban’s relics were apparently scattered during the Dissolution, but a bone believed to be a relic of St Alban, the first British martyr, was returned to Hertfordshire by a group from the church of St Pantaleon in Cologne, Germany,  and presented to St Albans Cathedral. The bone was placed inside the restored 13th Century saint's shrine on 29th June 2002. So there you have it. St Alban in a nutshell.

I’m not sure, as usual, that St Alban holds any major lessons for me, other than to keep out of the way of stroppy Roman soldiers with sharp swords, and, to be honest, I would probably have done that anyway.  But the story of St Alban is indicative of something else, I suppose – the ever changing palimpsest of the English landscape, from Roman Town to the site of two bloody battles in The Wars of The Roses, in 1455 and 1461,  to relative prosperity in the 18^th century as a market town on several stagecoach routes, the silk industry and the straw plaiting industry in the 19^th century. In some ways it’s a story that’s replayed across many towns in England, making up the patchwork, the very fabric of our social and local history.

It looks like I shall shortly be off on one of my peregrinations through that fabric again, anyway, but not southwards, northwards this time, as the day of our departure to Arran approaches. The camper must be packed, Matilda consigned to the care of Granny, and my wheelchair, with me in it, pushed up the ramps to enable me to transfer into the front passenger seat.  There are still a few weeks of summer left, I suppose, though when we get back towards the end of August, it will be all hell and no notion again into a new term and a new academic year.

I wish I could get enthusiastic about going off on holiday but I am not feeling in very good nick right now, and to be honest, I worry about having some sort of major medical emergency and screwing everything up again, just like I did in 2010, when instead of setting off for Arran, I ended up spending six months in Huddersfield Royal. Let’s hope not. I’ve long since given up dreaming of waking up cured one morning, but it would be good to wake up tomorrow morning feeling that this foul bug had quit my mortal frame and I was back to something like what passes for normal. I don’t know how successful I will be at maintaining this blog from the Isle of Arran, though, especially given the staggering amount of stuff I need to take with me to work on, and the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t nature of internet connections on the Island. But the road is calling. Farewell, farewell, to you who would hear, you lonely travellers all, the cold north wind shall blow again, the winding road does call, and all that.

So, you find me at a strangely downbeat end to a strangely downbeat week, really. In limbo. I’ll no doubt be better tomorrow, but I am sitting here right now, a bit like T S Eliot’s Gerontion, a dried, wizened old man in a dry house. Eventually, I hope Deb will be back from Wessenden with Misty in time to watch Belgium v Russia or whatever delights the TV has to serve up for us tonight. I might even try and have something to eat, for the first time in two or three days.  Begone, foul bugatry!

Epiblog for the Feast of St Vitus

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Sadly, the promise of a scorching summer lasting three months remains, at the moment, any weatherman’s tantalising dream.  You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, as Robert Zimmerframe once smartly remarked.  In the meantime, we have dull warm days with showers, and occasional thunder.

The latter caused a particular problem, unfortunately, one which I must confess I hadn’t actually foreseen, and which almost had unfortunate consequences.  I was working away as usual and I had the conservatory door open because I could see that it was going to absolutely bang it down with rain at any moment, and when it started, I anticipated Matilda, who was outside on the decking, scuttling to safety, following which I would then shut the door and let it snow let it snow let it snow. 

So far so good.  The air was hot, heavy and sultry, and a huge clap of thunder reverberated almost directly overhead, causing the very atmosphere to vibrate, tintinnabulating like a bell.  I was vaguely aware of a black and white form emerging from behind the settee and streaking across the kitchen, and just caught sight of the white bob on the end of Misty’s tail as she vanished through the open door.  Oh shit, another lost dog situation.

I shouted to Deb that the dog had bolted, and she came through and, pausing briefly to berate me for being an idiot and leaving the door open in  the first place, went out into the garden looking for Misty. No sign. Meanwhile, the initial clap of thunder had been the signal for the deluge to start, and it was sheeting down like a car wash. Bang! another thunderclap. Matilda was also missing in action, and I could only hope she’d managed to hunker down under the decking somewhere until the storm passed over.  Deb came back in, hurrying through to the front of the house, without explanation, and disappeared into the waterfall that was rapidly covering the driveway. A few seconds later, she was back, dragging Misty by the collar. Thankfully, she’d glimpsed Misty charging wildly around between John’s apple trees, and had anticipated that she’d make a break for the front garden.  She was jumping up frantically, trying to get in the locked door of the camper when Debbie caught her.  I shuddered to think of her running madly, blindly, out into the road, especially as any motorist’s stopping distance and vision would have been seriously affected by the monsoon.

As quickly as it had come, the storm passed, and Misty, very subdued, curled up in a ball with her nose in her tail for about an hour, just inside the kitchen door, where she obviously felt safest.  The bad news is that this means that, despite the fact that we’ve had her for almost a year now, her fear of sudden loud bangs and noises is still as acute as ever, and I must admit I had been lulled into one of those famous false senses of security, and we are going to have to take appropriate precautions.  Whatever it was in her formative years that happened to scare her, it must have been very traumatic to have that sort of lasting effect. I had speculated to Deb that, given Misty’s area of origin, maybe she had strayed onto one of the military practice ranges in Northumberland.

Matilda, meanwhile, did eventually return, rather bedraggled but none the worse for wear, and I dried her off with a piece of kitchen roll in the time-honoured manner.  Other than that escapade, she has had rather an uneventful week, even for her, although she did almost catch a squirrel on Friday.  I had previously put out some stale bread buns for the birds, and – probably because it was partially hidden by the double jamb of the conservatory doors – I failed to notice the squirrel sitting just outside on the deck with a huge piece of a bread bap in its mouth. Matilda slipped out of the open door, and for a second they were face to face, each mutually astonished. Then the squirrel very wisely dropped the bread and legged it up the tree, with Matilda in pursuit, but by the time she’s lumbered to the top of the steps leading down into the garden, Mr Nutkin was already several forests away.

Wild goose chases – or wild squirrel chases, come to that - have been the order of the week.  I waited in vain for a delivery of jiffy bags on Tuesday (I know, it’s just one white knuckle ride of excitement here) because I needed them to be a specific size to send out the review copies of Blood in The Air, only to be told that Viking couldn’t be bothered to deliver to us that day, so I ended up having to bodge something.  Then, on Saturday, I got up at 7AM because Debbie’s upgraded phone was due to be delivered from that time onward. Needless to say, it didn’t arrive until 11:59.  By 4pm, we had finally managed to work out how to get the back off without using a tin opener, and, once the battery was inserted, it did actually work, about as well as any other touch-screen phone, ie not very well at all. Still, considering the elderly Samsung of mine she’s been using since her beloved Motorola died had itself started to display the symptoms of phone Alzheimer’s, some sort of change was inevitable. I was sad for the old Samsung. It never really dried out, after being immersed in the water that collected in Debbie’s anorak pocket as she climbed High Raise.

During the week, the camper van went up to the garage for its usual checkup before we contemplate leaving for Scotland in about three or four weeks’ time.  Unfortunately, owing to the fact that Kirklees Council has only bothered to repair the potholes on the actual route of the Tour de France, leaving the rest of the borough to degenerate into a moonscape shambles, we seem to have acquired a cracked engine mounting. Ouch. On the one hand, good job I have been trying to hoard money since this time last year, on the other hand, though, whoops there goes another rubber tree dam.  To continue the theme of things blowing up/breaking down, this week the thing on the end of the hoover’s flexible hose finally broke off, and it seems a new one is £43.70 (how?) and there is a crack in the glass in the front of the stove. I can’t remember offhand how much a new glass is, but it’s expensive.

Surprisingly, none of this happened on Friday 13^th, but with this sort of shit screaming in at you from all directions, who needs Friday 13^th anyway.  Talking of ordure, this week we also received our free copy of The Sun, which is being delivered to all households in the UK by Rupert Murdoch’s myrmidons, in a desperate attempt to boost sales. All households except those in Liverpool and Sheffield, where they still haven’t forgiven him for Hillsborough, and presumably omitting also any households where the many victims of his unscrupulous phone-tapping hack editors live. No? You surprise me.  If there was ever any doubt that this was a concerted effort, surfing a wave of crude “patriotism” based on our presence at yet another unsuccessful world cup bid, backed by politicians, we have only to look at the carefully-staged photos of the leaders of both major political parties and the Liberal Democrats, holding up their copies of the rag, with gleeful approval. I have to say that I hadn’t realised until now quite how dumb Ed Miliband was, but his decision to take part in this charade is yet another reason why he will never be Prime Minister.  For some reason, I seem to have got onto One Nation Labour’s email list, and this week I had an email from Baroness Doreen Lawrence inviting me to donate £3.00 to be entered into a prize draw for the chance to meet her, and Ed Miliband, at a “gala dinner” at the House of Lords. I was very tempted to reply asking how much it was for the chance of NOT meeting Ed Miliband, but since no one reads my replies anyway (if they did, they would have taken me off the list long ago) I decided to save my breath to cool my porridge.

Coming, as it did, hard on the heels of being told by the Government what British values (such as stopping off for a curry on the way home from the pub) consisted of, and why I was unpatriotic unless I shared them, The Sun was sort of the last straw, and I flipped, and posted this on Facebook:

Well. My "special" free edition of The Sun arrived in the post at lunchtime, and I have to say, it is the most deeply unpleasant, jingoistic, bigoted, xenophobic piece of crap that has ever crossed my doorstep.

If I could, I would find the #### responsible, and nail it to their head. Don't get me wrong, I love my country as much as the next man. I've devoted 25 years of my life to reprinting old guidebooks about its history. But I am sick to the back teeth of having "patriotism" defined for me. You can't be patriotic unless you "support our boys", apparently. Not quite sure which steaming pile of recycled spag bol we're referring to here, whether it's the mess in Iraq, the pointless waste of lives in Afghanistan, or the forthcoming debacle in Brazil. You can't be patriotic, apparently, unless you're clutching a pint of lager, you're draped in a St George Flag, and you're chanting "Ingerlund".

You can't be patriotic unless you drive a white van, like Britain first, and hate Muslims. I won't ask what happened to the "British values" of compassion, fair play, tolerance, gentle humour and looking out for each other, especially those worse off than yourself. No, we're a "Christian" country, apparently. Only if being Christian is to pass by on the other side, to ignore the people trying to sleep on the spikes.

Well, The Sun can ### right off along with its Australian expat tax dodging owner. I don't take lectures on patriotism from steaming #####  in the gutter press. And as for the government, and its "British values", seeking to distract us from its war on the old and the ill by bogus patriotism, this is not a zombie government, undead but still walking. It is a dead government. Government for the dead, by the dead. Dead, deceased, moribund. Deader than Monty Python’s parrot. Deader than tank tops and sideways-ironed flares.

Let us then recognise it for what it is, and lay its sorry tale to rest in unrecorded, unremarked, unconsecrated earth. Cover its stinking carrion carcass with rubbish so that we no longer have to look upon it, let its bones disarticulate and crumble until nothing remains, let the earth lie heavy on it, and may God have no mercy whatsoever on its soul.

I had 59 “likes” and one person who accused me of being anti-English. Go figure. The hashtags above are for redacted bad cuss-words that were in the original. I ended up quoting from my own blog in my own defence.

When you see the Church lining up in serried ranks of Bishops and Archbishops behind the sceptres, thrones and powers of the Establishment at a time when poor people are suffering and being hardest hit, it does lead you to wonder why we allow an 80 year old woman in a tin hat encrusted with priceless jewels sit on a throne at the State opening of Parliament and make speeches about the need for austerity!

And yet, and yet… as Churchill once said of democracy, it’s the worst possible system, until you look at all of the others! So it is for me, with the Monarchy. I tend to dissociate the institution from its inhabitants. As an institution, the Monarchy acts as a constitutional bulwark against the ambitions of arriviste politicians, which makes Elizabeth II worth her weight in gold just for that, alone. And if I had to celebrate anything, I would celebrate the fact that Elizabeth II has managed to thwart the designs on power of all would-be presidents for the last 60 years!

In the same way that Orson Welles in The Third Man sneered that 500 years of civilization in Switzerland had produced the cuckoo clock, you could say that 150 years of democracy in this country since the Great Reform Bill has produced Jeremy Hunt. If you are looking for someone who is totally out of touch with the fears and concerns of ordinary people, it’s the professional political class, exemplified by both major parties (and the Liberal Democrats) not the Royals, that should occupy your gaze. Maybe we should go back to direct rule by the Monarch, and put Mr Hunt and his cronies in the Tower (except they might scare away the ravens; they certainly scare me!)

So I’ll be raising my glass of “Old Cloudy” and trying not to get too many raindrops in it, this weekend, to 60 years of Ruritanian muddle and fudge. To a constitution that allows for men in tights and tabards, called things like “Maltravers Herald Extraordinary” and “Rouge Dragon”, whose chief claim to fame is the ability to walk backwards up a red carpet while carrying a crown on a velvet cushion. I’ll be drinking to all the little villages like Swan-Upping on Thames, with their village halls, their bunting and their church and pub and cricket on the green. Yes, and spinsters cycling to Matins, if it comes to that. I’ll be drinking to the steam trains and morris men and cathedral choirs and people in waders rescuing mating swans, I’ll be drinking to the fishermen of England, a-working at their nets and wondering how much Royal Mail will charge to post a sturgeon from Cromer to London. I’ll be drinking to the ancient statutes that allow the Freemen and Burgesses of the borough to graze their cattle on the Westwood, or even Vivienne Westwood. Or, if wet, in the Village Hall. Can I borrow your lawn-mower, old chap?

And I’ll be drinking to the people of England – fair, tolerant, dreamers and poets to a man and woman, and with an eye for the underdog. The ones who go out of their way to hold raffles for lifeboats, homeless dogs and feral cats. They are where the true power of England lies, or should I say WE are where the true power of England lies, this curiously shaped little Island with its leg sticking out into the wild Atlantic.

I could go on at great length about Englishness. I frequently do. But, you will be relieved to hear, my ire has passed somewhat, or at least been replaced with other, hotter, more recent ires. Many ires in the fire, in fact. Not least of which was at the furore which blew up about the spikes in the doorway of the block of flats in London, deliberately placed there by the owners to deter rough sleeping. I wrote about these last week, and it seems it was but the start of a whole ball of confusion and recrimination on all sides. Predictably, Katie Hopkins, a failed reality TV show contestant who has since relied on her controversial mouth to attempt to prolong her waning “fame”, came out on the side of the landlords, describing the homeless as “vermin”.

Hopkins has her own desperate reasons to try and put off the day when she has to acknowledge her own failure and get a proper job, but even by her standards of muttonheaded unquestioning compassionless bigotry, this set the bar at a new low. I don’t know if she is familiar with the following quotation from Aneurin Bevan, in his Labour conference speech of 4^th July 1948:

“… no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation. Now the Tories are pouring out money in propaganda of all sorts and are hoping by this organised sustained mass suggestion to eradicate from our minds all memory of what we went through. But, I warn you young men and women, do not listen to what they are saying now. Do not listen to the seductions of Lord Woolton. He is a very good salesman. If you are selling shoddy stuff you have to be a good salesman. But I warn you they have not changed, or if they have they are slightly worse than they were.”

I’ve seen vermin, and I’ve seen Katie Hopkins, and I know which I prefer. Boris Johnson, nominally at least the Mayor of London, waded in with his own suggestion that the spikes be removed. Because obviously, the solution to homelessness is more comfortable doorways!  Never mind the disease, let’s just keep on treating the symptoms, folks!  A philosophy that was also manifested this week in the Junta complaining about Oxfam’s latest poster campaign, which seeks to point out that the inevitable result of a coming together of “austerity” and welfare cuts is going to be child poverty and deprivation, right here in the UK.  The Blight Brigade complained that Oxfam had strayed beyond its core “charitable purposes” and into the field of political campaigning.  

The problem with the "charitable purposes" argument, it seems to me, is that in effect it amounts to charities being told to shut up and treat the symptoms, rather than tackling the root cause of the disease. I have no particular brief for Oxfam, or any large charity for that matter, but I don't see how you can passionately and assiduously work to alleviate poverty and specifically child deprivation, yet at the same time ignore the causes of those very problems in our own country: an unelected Junta waging class war. In effect, the "charitable purposes" argument is saying to charities, it's OK to rattle a tin on the street corner, but don't you dare try and change anything fundamental! Still, however bad things are at home, we can always look to the Middle East, and the shining success engendered by our timely intervention in Iraq in 2002, as that country progresses ever onwards and upwards to hitherto-unknown levels of stability and prosperity…er…oh.

So, after a weary week, we came to Sunday, and the feast of St Vitus. Oddly enough, during the week, while looking for some virtually unobtainable Peter Bellamy tracks online, I came across his setting of Kipling’s poem A Pilgrim’s Way, with its lines:

I do not look for holy saints to guide me on my way,
Or male and female devilkins to lead my feet astray.
If these are added, I rejoice—if not, I shall not mind,
So long as I have leave and choice to meet my fellow-kind.
For as we come and as we go (and deadly-soon go we!)
The people, Lord, Thy people, are good enough for me!
Thus I will honour pious men whose virtue shines so bright
(Though none are more amazed than I when I by chance do right),
And I will pity foolish men for woe their sins have bred
(Though ninety-nine per cent. of mine I brought on my own head).
And, Amorite or Eremite, or General Averagee,
The people, Lord, Thy people, are good enough for me!

And when they bore me overmuch, I will not shake mine ears,
Recalling many thousand such whom I have bored to tears.
And when they labour to impress, I will not doubt nor scoff;
Since I myself have done no less and—sometimes pulled it off.
Yea, as we are and we are not, and we pretend to be,
The people, Lord, Thy people, are good enough for me!

And maybe that is where I have been going wrong. Saints started out just like you and me, it’s simply that something happened to them to make them more remembered than the many thousands of unsung saints who lie forgotten in unmarked, unremembered tombs. Or maybe sainthood, whatever it consists of, is potentially latent in all of us, and we just have to find ways of bringing it to the surface.

St Vitus, at any rate, according to unverifiable legends, was the only son of a Roman senator in Sicily, and became a Christian when he was twelve. Unfortunately, his various miracles and conversions brought him to the attention of the Roman Administrator, Valerian, who tried unsuccessfully to shake St Vitus’s faith during an interview.  Although Valerian was unsuccessful, Vitus, his tutor Modestus, and their servant Crescentia decided it was prudent to flee anyway, first to Lucania, and then on to Rome, where Vitus, a glutton for punishment it would seem, freed the son of Emperor Diocletian from possession by an evil spirit. Diocletian was understandably chuffed by this, and invited Vitus to make a sacrifice to the Gods in thanks. Vitus refused and tried to explain about his beliefs, which led to Diocletian immediately accusing him of sorcery!

Despite being tortured, all three of them emerged unscathed from the ordeal and were freed when the Temples were destroyed in a mighty storm, an angel leading them back to Lucania, where they eventually died. Three days after his death, Vitus appeared to a distinguished matron named Florentia, who then found the bodies and buried them in the spot where they were.   Whatever nuggets of truth or otherwise lie hidden in this obscure narrative, nevertheless there was a strong cult and tradition of veneration of Vitus, Modestus and Crescentia in Lucania (the Roman province of that name in southern Italy between the Tuscan Sea and the Gulf of Taranto).

An even greater devotion to St Vitus developed in Saxony when the saint’s relics were translated there in 836AD.  He became, inter alia, the patron saint of epileptics, those afflicted with St Vitus Dance, dancers in general, actors, entertainers, and as a protector against storms (where was he on Monday, I wonder) animal attacks, and oversleeping. In later years in Germany and Latvia, his feast day of 15th June was celebrated by people dancing in front of his statue, and the name of the practice was eventually adopted to apply to people suffering from Sydenham’s Chorea. 

Saint Vitus is one of the Fourteen Martyrs who are known as the “Fourteen Holy Helpers” who give aid in times of trouble.  He is often represented as a young man with a palm-leaf, in a cauldron, sometimes with a raven and a lion, because, according to the legend, during his tortures he was thrown into a cauldron of boiling tar and molten lead, but miraculously escaped unscathed. St Vitus’s Day is also the subject of a popular weather rhyme: "If St. Vitus' Day be rainy weather, it shall rain for thirty days together".

Michael J. Towsend writes, in his book The Way,

The kindly observer who commented that the phrase 'The patron saint of Methodism is St Vitus' "summed up with reasonable accuracy many people's impressions of the Methodist Church. Methodists, surely, are supremely busy people, always rushing around organizing things and setting up committees to do good works. They can generally be relied upon to play their part in running Christian Aid Week, the sponsored walk for the local hospice or the group protesting about homelessness, and they are known, even now, to be activists in trades unions and political parties.

If that’s the case, then we clearly need a massive influx of the spirit if St Vitus to sweep across the land, much in the same way as 18th-century Methodism swept across Heckmondwike and into the River Calder. Starting with the Labour Party.

Today is also Fathers’ Day, apparently. I’m not quite sure when this particular tradition started and I suspect it may be an import from America, and in any case I don’t feel I need a specific day to remember my Dad, because he is, in many ways, with me on a daily basis. My humour is his humour, and increasingly, my likes and dislikes are similar to what his became. He taught me the value of truth, and also the value of cynicism. And many other values besides. True British values, such as dry humour and the value of spending the occasional day at the seaside, or sitting on the slipway at Brough Haven, watching the coasters go by.  The value of having an enthusiasm (his was photography, mine is proving people wrong) and the value of regretting, and questioning the need for war.  He ended up in Germany at the end of it, and saw the devastation, and some of the camps, at first hand. “It’s a great life; work hard and play hard” he once said to me. And he was right, about that as about so many other things.

I’ll certainly need a good dose of his worldy-wise, dry humour to get me through next week, which is shaping up to be another doozie. Organising the Kindle edition of Blood in the Air, fighting with the garage over the bill, and starting to work on the many and multifarious tasks which need doing before I can trundle off in the direction of the Isle of Arran with a clear conscience. And maybe a dose of his faith as well. I have said this before, but the lines in To Be A Pilgrim about

Whoso beset him round with dismal stories

Do but themselves confound, his strength the more is

could have been written with him in mind. He was as unconvinced as I am about the whole paraphernalia attached to organised religion, but nevertheless he got up and got on and got out there and did it, whatever needed doing. He was no saint, but then which one of us is? Thy people oh thy people, are good enough for me.   So, let’s raise a glass to Dads, I suppose, and remember them, today and every day. And as for next week, well, there may be trouble ahead, but for once I am going to take my (sadly only metaphorical) cue from St Vitus.  Let’s face the music, and dance.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Cloud

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  Sadly, the weather has returned to being “changeable” at best, and – even more sadly – such sunny times as we have had, have managed to coincide perfectly with the points when I was stuck inside working on stuff that absolutely positively had to be done, so my grand plans for the garden, for instance, remain largely unimplemented. I will have to get my act in gear, as it’s already the first week of June, somehow, incredibly, without me noticing.

Matilda’s been able to take advantage of the sunny spells, though, and so has Debbie, when she’s not been teaching. Misty doesn’t care if it’s sunny, raining, snowing or what, as long as she can go walkies and chase sticks in the woods. And if Zak comes along for the ride, so much the better.  Actually, I could have substituted the word “Debbie” for the word “Misty” in that sentence and it would still have been true.  Especially if she can take her pruning saw and bring some of the sticks she’s retrieved back with her, and make a brushwood shelter in the garden where she pretends that Ray Mears lives.

Her latest thing is collecting resin from fallen branches. Apparently you can mix it with sawdust or something and make some sort of substance that will light your bush-fire even if it’s raining. I told her that Sainsbury’s have been onto the idea for months now. They’re called firelighters, and they’ll even deliver them alongside the weekly shop, but I suppose it’s more fun if you forage for your own while wet through and courting hypothermia. It’s certainly more fun than working for nothing for Kirklees College, anyway.  But then so is 18^th century dentistry and bowel surgery in the desert using only a sharp stick and no anaesthetic.  And, of course, we’re shortly to enter the absurd, Kafkaesque period where rumour swirls around about how many hours Debbie is going to be allowed to work for no pay during the academic year starting in September. Oh, the joys.

I’ve had my head down all week, to be honest. The imminent arrival of Blood in the Air: The Chronicles of Kari True has seen me processing orders, compiling review lists, printing out labels, packing orders, shifting boxes to make room, and a myriad of other tasks attendant on any new book arriving.  Plus of course all the other stuff, like dealing with the garage over the camper’s “snags list” and doing the VAT return and writing up three months worth of receipts and arrrrrrrrgh. I was a free man in Paris, I felt unfettered and alive, as the divine Joni sings. I’d go back there tomorrow but for the work I’ve taken on, stoking the star-maker machinery behind the popular song.

I would do it, as well. Don’t think I wouldn’t. The week did, however, contain a small oasis, in that I had to attend Huddersfield Royal Infirmary for my annual cripple’s MOT and general checkup.  This time I didn’t see the redoubtable Dr Naylor, but one of his registrars instead, who, no doubt because we hadn’t met before, went through my case notes with me in some considerable detail.  The NHS may be under pressure like never before and under attack and threat of privatisation, but I have to report that, at the sharp end, it is still definitely alive and probing.

The upshot was that the feelings of constant tiredness, coupled with the attacks of shivering and feeling cold, and tending to nod off in the afternoons, could be because of some problem with my blood, or because the fact that I am apparently clinically depressed has disturbed my circadian rhythm (whatever that might be, I thought it was something to do with grasshoppers) or – looking on the bright side, both.  To check out the former, they sent me off to the Flea-Bottomist, who duly extracted an armful of the old Rhesus O’Negative (begorrah) which they took away for testing, and as to the latter, they once more offered me chemical bombers with which to blitz it, an offer which I once again declined in favour of persevering with St John’s Wort because I’d rather be a herbal zombie than a chemical one.

Oh, and yes I do have cellulitis, and yes I am now the proud possessor of enough penicillin to kill an army, which I have to take at carefully regulated intervals in order to see it off.  As far as my legs are concerned, the options for straightening them are as they were a year ago, so we’re no further on there, except in time, of course, which never stands still. I had ambivalent feelings about the hospital as well. It had been my home for six months, but on this visit I did find it threatening, just a tad, because of the thought that you could end up being admitted there and have no idea when, if ever, you would go home again.  The best thing about the day, to be honest, was being able to surrender my transport to the whim of others. Just for once, probably because being independent is so, so tiring, I was glad of it. I was delivered like a parcel or a sack of spuds to the hospital door by the patient transport service, I passed seamlessly into the care of a Scottish lady porter with a buzz-cut and tattoos on her forearms, who shoved me down the corridor to the nurses running the clinic, who parked me up until the Registrar was ready to see me.

The system only started to come apart once.  After I’d been to the pharmacy, I decided to try and find my own way back to the ambulance discharge lounge, and asked two security blokes, who were sitting behind a kiosk desk, staring glassily into space, whether the discharge lounge was down this corridor, indicating with my finger extended in the traditional pointy manner. “Yes, mate,” they replied, so I set off. The corridor was, of course, about four miles long, and by the time I’d propelled myself five eighths of the way along it, to where another corridor intersected with it at right angles, I was having misgivings (as opposed to having Miss Givings, which I can assure you is altogether more fun).  I paused to consider my options. I was pretty sure that I was on the wrong corridor, but the question was, should I persevere or should I veer off down the left hand corridor and see what happened.

Just then, a young girl carrying an armful of files came click clacking towards me and I could tell from her badge on a lanyard that she worked there. So I stopped her and asked her if she know where the lift to the discharge lounge was. After initially thinking I was making some kind of joke about airport departure lounges (no, I have absolutely no idea either) we overcame that particular barrier, only to find out that she hadn’t a clue.  But she did kindly volunteer to skip along the left hand corridor and check it out for me. She returned, like the spies that went into Canaan, with good news. It appeared that this corridor joined another corridor, and that the other corridor contained a lift to the discharge lounge.

Thanking her, I set off with renewed vigour. When I reached the end of that corridor, I found that what she had omitted to tell me was that the lift was at the very far end of another four mile corridor, running back parallel with the one I had initially travelled down.  Muttering under my breath, and wishing the security guards an early acquaintance with a disused lift-shaft, I set off up the final leg of what had proved to be a massive U turn, three sides of a square, and trundled into the lift. It was a positive relief to be scooped up once again and delivered home by the ambulance service, where I found Debbie sitting in the driveway in the camper van, fuming because she’d got back from teaching without her house keys and been unable to get in.

We have both known that this appointment was scheduled for months in advance, and in any case, any normal person keeps all of their keys on one fob. Then, if you’ve got your keys, you’ve got all your keys. Despite this, and despite the fact that she’d made good use of the time by cooking herself some couscous on the camper stove, eating it, and then falling asleep, somehow all this was still my fault. I would like to have the jury take into consideration the additional crime of being male in a public place.

Friday saw me madly trying to catch up with all the stuff I’d neglected on Thursday, while keeping half an eye on the D-Day “Celebrations”.  The week’s news hadn’t really impinged on me in any meaningful way, to be honest, though I did note two stories that made me smile. A man wearing a gorilla suit was shot by a vet in Tenerife at the zoo, with a tranquilising dart, because a panicky member of the public had reported an ape on the loose. He was actually a staff member, and had been wearing the suit as part of an exercise to simulate how they would tackle the escape of a real gorilla, if it ever happened. I’d say they came out of it with flying colours, and fortunately, despite being hit with enough tranquiliser to stop a 200KG beast, the zoo employee survived. Plus, on the bright side, it did give me the chance to reprise the old joke about “Was he wild? I’ll say, be was absolutely livid!” on Facebook.

Then there was the guinea-pig, now inevitably renamed Randy, who escaped from his enclosure at a wildlife park in Warwickshire and, during his short period of relative freedom, managed to mate with 100 female guinea-pigs and make them all pregnant.  Way to go, Randy. I gather the wildlife park has subsequently had several enquiries from Peruvian catering establishments.  Other than that, it’s been a pretty sombre week, sadly, with not only D-Day but also the Newark by-election.  I don’t think anyone comes out of that particular imbroglio well. Even with many traditional non-Tory voters casting their ballots tactically to deny UKIP, even with the Tories throwing everything including the Butler’s Belfast sink at it, no doubt to the continuing interest of the Electoral Commission, their majority was still severely curtailed. UKIP came second, which should be sounding big alarm bells for Labour, except that someone seems to have shot Ed Miliband with a tranquilising dart, and the Lib Dems trailed in sixth, just above the monster raving loonies, the electorate having subjected them to pretty much the same experience as that meted out by Randy the guinea-pig to his colleagues, but without the promise of a subsequent happy event to mitigate the shock.

So we came to D-Day, and the inevitable feast of compulsory patriotism mixed with religion used for the purposes glorifying war which we seem to get served up by the BBC and others at all these types of events. As usual, the message is that if you don’t support our troops and respect the memory of the D Day veterans you’re some kind of commie Muslim fellow traveller, or worse. See also under the absolutely disgraceful and unauthorised use of Lee Rigby’s name on the ballot paper by far-right groups in the election.   Plus, I have to say, that some of the media were extremely patronising in their interviews with the men who took part, many of whom are now elderly and frail.

That doesn't mean I'm not grateful for the efforts, the bravery and the sacrifice of the generation that stopped Hitler, including my dad. It means I am sadder than ever to see the brave new world that came about as a result of the 1945 election is being dismantled around our ears as we speak.  God knows it's bad enough that people died so we could have decent housing, healthcare and education in the first place, without seeing their sacrifice trampled in the mud and the rise of fascism again across Europe. Have we learned NOTHING in the last 70 years?

Pause to consider the irony. In the week where we were supposedly giving thanks for the sacrifice of the fallen on D-Day in the struggle to stop Fascism, it was announced by the Junta that we were looking at the prospect of the first ever secret trial.  We only found out about the existence of the trial itself because the media managed to overturn, partially, a reporting ban, but even so, all we know now is that there are two defendants, known only as AB and CD, who have allegedly been engaging in some malarkey prejudicial to national security which is so drastic as to warrant ditching Magna Carta and 800 years of Common Law Jurisprudence and trying them in secret, a secrecy so complete that we, the people, will not even be told the outcome or the sentence.

We’ve already had the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill, which criminalises any behaviour “likely to cause nuisance and offence”; we’ve already had the Justice and Security Bill, where, under the legislation, the government would be able to cover up its own crimes by introducing “closed ministerial procedures”, in effect excluding the public and the media from proceedings where the Government is a defendant and “national security” is said to be at stake.  These are all very dangerous precedents.  While no one would argue that there are circumstances where a degree of anonymity is advisable in court, both in “security” cases and others – rape proceedings for instance – nevertheless, this precedent would allow any unscrupulous government to cook up any poodlefaking nonsense about national security and try anybody for anything without due process or scrutiny. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust the present government to run a bath, and I doubt, given what we know about the run up to the Iraq invasion, that Labour would be any better – but just imagine what a UKIP government could do with such carte blanche.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s Lawrence McNamara, Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director, Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law, on the same subject:

This request for secrecy is a landmark in the trend to institutionalise and normalise secrecy.  It will inevitably damage public trust in our justice system and our governments.  It is difficult to see that damaging that trust will foster national or international security. A cloak of secrecy in criminal trials will not result in ‘secret justice’.  It will result in secrecy at the expense of justice.

Despite the fact that we’re busily inventing the justice system so beloved of the Gestapo, this hasn’t stopped politicians of every political hue from trying to hijack the D-Day anniversary for their own ends.  It is mainly the far-right, of course, with groups such as Britain First flooding social media with “share if you think this is a disgrace” type posts, usually involving dubious and warped statements where usually Muslims in some way shape or form are the fall guys.  Or immigrants. (They regard the two as synonymous anyway).  Jade Wright, writing in the Liverpool Daily Echo, of all places, nailed this rather comprehensively for me:

I’m pretty sure that my friends wouldn’t knowingly post links from a far right group’s site. But when the photo shows a brave D Day veteran with the words “We will remember them”, people share it without looking where it came from. It must have escaped Britain First that those brave D Day soldiers were putting their lives on the line fighting a war against fascism. My grandma and granddad both served in the war, in the WAAF and RAF. They would both be horrified to see important anniversaries highjacked [sic]  by any political party. Patriotism and racism are two very different things. I am  hugely proud to be British. But the country I’m proud of is a vibrant, multicultural one with people of all different faiths living together peacefully. It’s a country that helps the sick and educates every child for free, where all adults have the vote and we have progressive laws in place to protect the most vulnerable.

The more mainstream political parties are not above appropriating the imagery of the Second World War for their own purposes, either. As political blogger “Beastrabban” has pointed out

The Tories too, have had absolutely no qualms about using images from WW2 in their election propaganda. I can remember their 1987 election broadcast being awash with images of dog-fighting Spitfires, ending with an excited voice exclaiming ‘It’s great to be great again’. All while Thatcher was doing her level best to destroy real wages and smash Britain as a manufacturing nation in the interests of the financial sector. The satirist Alan Coren drily remarked that the broadcast showed that the War was won by ‘the Royal Conservative Airforce’, and stated that it was highly ironic that in reality all the servicemen went off and voted Labour.

There was also the issue of the BNP “Spitfire” election  leaflet, of course, that turned out to be bearing the squadron identification letters of one of the Polish squadrons in the Battle of Britain.  Labour’s Second World War mythos is tied up with the 1945 election and the foundation of the Welfare State, so I can imagine that, given their current policy of being the Tories, they probably want to keep quiet about all that welfare and social justice stuff.

Personally,  the D-Day recollections that I found to ring truest of all for me were those which the late Keith Marsden used in his song St Aubin Sur Mer.  St Aubin Sur Mer was one of the coastal villages just behind the British beaches on D-Day, and the scene of bitter fighting. Marsden, a much-neglected songwriting talent and sadly no longer with us, wrote the song after talking with D-Day veterans. In fact he seems to have had a bit of a “thing” about D-Day in general, because he also wrote Normandy Orchards, a sad, elegiac lament about the waste of life and unrequited love brought about by war

They say you can still hear the village-hall band,

grey, ghostly couples still glide round the floor,
But Normandy orchards were waiting to welcome

new partners for death in the mad dance of war…

Normandy Orchards has been recorded by Tom Lewis, on his album Mixed Cargo, but I looked in vain for any online rendition of St Aubin Sur Mer.  Marsden doesn’t pull any punches, though, when it comes to the way politicians seek to appropriate the past for their own ends, and remember, this was written before Blair and Bush railroaded us into Iraq, in fact Marsden had been dead 12 years when that happened:

We had patriotic heroes. We had make-believe old sweats,
But none had come with nineteen-fourteen innocence for fun.
If we paid the bill again for them, this time they'd not forget,
And there'd be a golden future when the present job was done.
But heroes, sweat or dreamer, the Old Reaper didn't care,
As the Germans swung their scythe through us at St Aubin Sur Mer,
As the Germans swung their scythe through us at St Aubin Sur Mer.

And now I see the glories of the brave new world we've made,
From the slaughter and the sacrifice, the maiming and the pain,
And I see the lying leaders as they posture and parade,
And trample on the dead men's dreams and ride to war again,
So don't tell me I was lucky I came back from over there.
The lucky ones died with their dreams in St Aubin Sur Mer.
The lucky ones died with their dreams in St Aubin Sur Mer.

I’m afraid that the “lying leaders” were very much in evidence on Friday, posturing and parading. I repeat, this is in no way intended to reflect badly on, or deny, the heroism and sacrifice which happened on all sides on 6 June 1944, and in the bitter campaign that followed as the Allies clawed their way across the Bocage country of Normandy. What I am opposed to, however, bitterly, is the appropriation of those acts of courage, heroism and sacrifice being appropriated for purposes for which they were never committed – often for purposes diametrically opposed to the reasons why they were committed.

I noted, for instance, this week, that inch-high metal studs have been installed outside a luxury block of flats to deter homeless people from sleeping in the doorway. They were added to the floor of an alcove by the main entrance to the flats in Southwark Bridge Road, South London, and were publicised on Twitter by an outraged priest, Rev. Sally Hitchiner. And well done her.  Did people fight and die on the beaches of Normandy so we could have a society where people (some of them ex-service personnel) have to doss down in doorways and under bridges anyway, let alone one where the rich and powerful treat these people as an infestation to be deterred, as if they were rats or pigeons?

Did they die on Sword, Gold, Juno and Omaha beaches so we could have a society that inflicts brutality and prejudice on the ill and the unemployed, particularly those with long-term conditions or disabilities?  Did they fall and die for the Bedroom Tax and ATOS assessments?  Did they mix their blood with the Normandy surf so the NHS could be dismantled without any mandate, and the 1930s diseases of rickets and TB be ushered back in?  Did people give their lives to build a country where a mother and her two small daughters could be wrenched from their home, banged up in a detention centre and then deported without due process and while an appeal was still being heard, back to a country where the least of their fears is going to be kidnap and/or female genital mutilation, as happened this week in the case of Afusat Saliu and her daughters?

I remember once having an argument – or at least a discussion – with my Dad, when he was still alive, about one of Bob Dylan’s protest songs – from memory, Masters of War.  My dad made the point, and it’s a valid one, that had the US army not done what it did in 1944, then Bob Dylan, and many others, at best would have been singing in German and at worst would have vanished from trace as many other people called “Zimmerman” probably did in 1941-45.  This is a valid point. But the US army of the Vietnam era was not engaged in an anti-Fascist crusade, Dylan’s song in any case is about the people who manufacture the weapons of war for all sides in every conflict, and, in any case, part of the freedom that people fought for in the struggle against Hitler is the very freedom to stand up and say when they think something is wrong or unjust. So I am standing up now and saying that the appropriation of D-Day by politicians of any hue to further their aims, especially the foaming-at-the-mouth “patriots” who say “hit like if you think we should take Britain back” are not doing this in my name. Not in my name.

Anyway, D-Day + 70 years came and went, and with it Saturday, which was a complete washout, and somehow we have arrived at the Feast of St Clodulf of Metz.

St Clodulf, in common with others of his era, had a name which is often spelled in a variety of ways – Chloduf, Clodulphe, Clodould, to name but three, but is more commonly known as St Cloud. He lived from 605AD to 696 or 697AD, and was Bishop of Metz, in Northern France, from approximately 657AD to 697 when he died. His job appears to have run in the family, because he was apparently the son of Arnhulf, who was also the Bishop of Metz. Just to confuse matters further, before his ordination he had married a woman whose name is not recorded, and who bore him a son, called Aunulf, just to confuse things further. When he became bishop, his wife took the veil and entered a nunnery.

In 657, after he became Bishop of Metz, he began a process of re-decorating the Cathedral of St Stephen in that city. But perhaps, for the cat lovers amongst us, his greatest attribute is that he was the brother-in-law of St Gertrude of Nivelles, the patron saint of cats. For this reason, although when he died he was buried in the church of St Arnulf in Metz, he was also venerated in Nivelles as “St Clou”. Having said that, some scholars believe that the supposed connection between Arnhuf of Metz and St Gertrude of Nivelles was at best a distortion of, and at worst a fabrication of, documents written long after the event.

Once again, at such a great distance in time, we have to take the supposed holiness of St Cloud on trust.  The best you can say is that, coming from a noble Frankish family, he could have shone in the king’s court, on the battlefield, or in many other areas open to the nobility of the time, but instead, he turned his back on all worldly matters and entered the clerical profession.

Something which, on occasions, can seem very tempting. I doubt the clerical profession would have me, however, and what I know about theology could be written on the back of a fag packet and still leave room for most of the Koran. A better option might be to follow Debbie’s leaning, and go and live in a yurt in the woods, with or without Ray Mears, but sadly, my present state precludes even that.

So, once more, another Sunday teatime finds me pretty much where I was last Sunday; waiting for Deb and the dogs to come back from Spring Wood, waiting for Matilda to come in off the decking and want feeding, waiting to see what my blood tests show about why I am tired all the time, waiting until the relentless hubbub starts up again tomorrow and I resume the unequal struggle against the apathy and inefficiency of both the book trade and people who I once counted as colleagues, in an attempt to drag myself out of the mire of debt: waiting, waiting, waiting, while life passes me by, and it’s only two weeks to Midsummer.  I can’t remember the exact quotation, but John Lennon once said that life is what happens to you while you’re waiting for something to happen. I groped feebly towards it in Zen and the Art of Nurdling, when I was talking about fielding:

Fielding is often seen by cricketers as something you do while waiting for it to be “your turn” to bat or to bowl.  Yet, for most of the players, fielding is what they do for most of the game, in fact the fielding is the game, in the same way as one day, some people find that, as John Lennon once said,  life is what happened to them while they were waiting for something to happen.  So, when you are fielding, especially in the deep, you should maintain the mental fiction that every ball is going to end up coming your way.  It won’t, of course, because fielding in the deep is like very much else in life, Lowis.  It consists of long periods of routine, even tedium, interspersed with seconds of crisis, major importance, or sometimes, blind panic.

Tomorrow is Dorothy’s funeral, up in Inverness. Yes, it can finally be told, I am indeed a “friend of Dorothy” and I don’t even like scatter cushions or interior design; I’m not that good with pot plants, either. Anyway, joking aside, the thought of Dorothy’s life, cut short at the same age as I am now, 59, and, in a different but related way, the thought of all those young lives cut short of D-Day, all that wasted potential, once more stirs a feeling in me that I ought to stop maundering about like a dingo with the mange and start to do something more with the time I have got left, however long, however little. Maybe I ought to be praying to Big G that I find the courage to take the pruning-shears to my own life, and lop off some dead wood. But that, of course, would imply a degree of change, and one thing I am definitely certain on is that I don’t like change. At least, I don’t like change that I am not in charge of, especially when it affects me. The trouble with that attitude, though, is that change still happens whether you like it or not. The graveyards are full of people who once thought themselves indispensible. My name is Ozymandias, king of kings, look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Or, as the Zen masters put it:

A flower falls whether we love it or not, and weeds grow whether we love them or not, and the peach blossom smells gorgeous, even when we are not around to smell it.

Even though it’s only a fortnight to Midsummer, I hope that there will still be peach blossom to enjoy a while yet, which implies a “me” for a while yet to enjoy it. And a “you”, too, if you want it. I’ll let you enjoy my peach blossom, if I can enjoy yours.